You are probably familiar with this problem: A sales document, a purchase order or a vacation request urgently needs to be approved. The responsible manager is on the road again - the approval is taking a long time. You have no choice but to "follow up" on the approval by phone. As soon as you reach your manager, he immediately complains about the current approval process:
"Every document has to be approved somewhere else!", "When will we finally have a convenient approval solution on the go?" or "When can I finally do the approval digitally and not on paper?"
Under S/4HANA, you now have an answer to your manager's questions: The introduction of Flexible Workflow for all your documents creates transparency and efficiency in the approval process and offers a uniform solution with which you can perform all approvals digitally.
What is Flexible Workflows?
Flexible Workflows is a new solution under SAP S/4HANA for implementing approval processes that can be used without additional licensing costs. SAP already offers such approval processes for a large number of business objects in the standard delivery. The same tool can thus be used across modules to set up new approval processes quickly and easily - whether in MM, SD, FI or other modules.
What is different than on an ECC system?
And this is how it works
Let us use the example of a purchase order to illustrate the approval process.
- The responsible purchaser creates a purchase order assigned to a cost center.
- In such cases, the approval should always be made by the person responsible for the cost center. This person is determined by the system.
- The manager can now be informed about this approval via various channels. For example, the cost center manager can regularly check his inbox in the FIORI Launchpad - FIORI App: "My Inbox" - for new approvals. To speed up the approval process, the user is also informed about the approval via push notifications in the Launchpad as well as via e-mail, if desired.
- In the "My Inbox", the document can be checked and approved or rejected. Further actions such as adding an approval note or forwarding to another person are also available here. If the decision is not made until later, the document can be set to resubmission: In this case, the order remains in the approval process, but is not displayed again until a defined date.
To ensure that the creator of the document is always informed about the current progress of the approval, SAP has integrated a workflow log in the respective FIORI apps of the business object such as purchase order. In addition, such a log is also available in the GUI for some documents. However, it is important to know that approval in GUI, e.g. via Business Workplace, is not possible.
Individual configuration makes you flexible
The Flexible Workflows solution lives up to its name: The large number of configurable parameters allows the release processes to be customized. The following graphic illustrates some of the possible configuration steps:
Summary
For those who rely on an automated and individual approval process, it is worth taking a closer look at the Flexible Workflow solution. Usable in S/4HANA without additional licensing costs and quick to learn, Flexible Workflows offers predefined scenarios that can be adapted to company-specific process characteristics. Learn more in our free webinar or by contacting us directly.
With Flexible Workflows, you can get more potential out of your business.
